Burned
by dharmamonkey
Summary: After a blizzard forces Booth to spend a day stuck in an elevator with his partner discussing both the past and future of their relationship, he reflects on the source of his continued anger and how to overcome it. Picks up at the end of "Blackout in the Blizzard" (6x16).


**Burned**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those little moments that Hart and friends leave out.

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**A/N:** _Another tiny dose of Boothiness to try and answer the question, "Why did Booth not make a move at the end of 'Blackout in the Blizzard'?" Brennan all but gave him the all-clear, but yet he held back and said he still needed time. What exactly was going on inside the Booth-brain at that moment, and later that night after he and Brennan burned the dates at the end of 6x16? What follows is my take on the situation._

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I told her I was angry.

And I am. I _am _angry. As I lay here in bed in the dead of night staring at my bedroom ceiling while the snow continues to fall outside, I'm so fucking pissed, I want to punch someone in the goddamn mouth.

But I'm not mad at Bones. God, the second I said that I was angry, the look on her face—so fragile, the way those beautiful blue-gray eyes of hers widened a little and got all shimmery with tears at the thought that I was angry with _her_—broke my heart.

I'm not mad at Bones. Not at all. Believe it or not, I'm not even mad at Hannah. Neither of them deserve what happened—all the heartache I've caused them both.

I'm the one. I'm the one that was an idiot. I'm the asshole. I'm the one I'm angry with. I'm the one to blame. So when I say I'm so fucking pissed that I want to punch someone in the teeth, the person I want to hit is me.

I fucked it all up, all by myself. I had the most amazing woman in my life. I got to spend almost every day with her, and see her on the weekends sometimes, and have dinner with her several nights a week. We were together practically all the time. Sure, I wanted more, and she wasn't quite ready to take things to the next step, but it's not like that was any kind of big newsflash. That's Bones. I know the gig. We'd been doing that slow little dance for years. But that night, back last April, I let myself listen to Sweets—fucking _Sweets_, for Christ's sake—and let him goad me into pushing her. I should have listened to my gut. My gut told me, she's not ready yet. _Give her more time, _it murmured. _She'll come around. _Gordon Gordon told me to be patient. But I didn't listen. I didn't fucking listen. Stubborn, stupid, impulsive bastard that I am. I didn't listen to Gordon Gordon. I didn't listen to my gut. And...

Above all, more than anything—and this is what makes me angrier than anything else—I didn't listen to _her_.

She's my partner. And I loved her. So why, why didn't I _listen_ to her? Why didn't I turn off the whirly-gig in my head for one goddamned minute and think? I know what she's like, better than anyone. She's always been that way—uneasy about feelings and emotions and relationships. That's part of who she is. It's part of what makes Bones…well, Bones. But once she gets there, once she decides she wants something, she goes after it like a piranha. But until she's ready, she hangs back and no amount of pushing will get her to move. I knew that. I fucking _knew _it. I sat in Gordon Gordon's restaurant kitchen and told him, "She doesn't love me—I would know if she loved me." But he knew as well as I did that it wasn't true.

Fact is, she _did _love me. She just wasn't ready to admit it to herself, never mind to me. Pushing her, rushing her like that, wasn't gonna make her get there any quicker than she was willing to go, no matter what I wanted. I knew that. You can't make Bones do anything she's not ready to do. She's gotta do things on her own timeline. I _knew_ that. I fucking knew it. But I let my own impatience and the momentum of my own feelings get the better of me. I rushed her that night when I asked me to give this thing between us a shot. I rushed her, pushed her farther than she was willing to go that night, and it blew up in our faces. I hurt her, and I hurt myself. I was an idiot, and I hurt her as a consequence. I saw it in her eyes that night—she knew I wanted more from her than she could give at that point, and I knew it hurt her. I hurt her. I put her in that position and I of all people should have known better.

Then, after that night, things got so awkward between us, we were each walking on eggshells, and she couldn't take it anymore. I can't blame her. She decided she needed some time off from us—from our partnership, from our work, from everything that had gotten so tense in the wake of that night at the Hoover—and she went off to Maluku. I went to Afghanistan. And then I did it again. After five months in that shitty sandbox—getting shot at, watching my guys get shot at, teaching my men to be more efficient killers and killing more people myself than I really even want to think about—I was at my wit's end. I hadn't heard from Bones, not a single email or letter in all those months, but I should have known better. My gut told me that she was just doing her squinty fieldwork thing out in the middle of Nowheresville, Indonesia where running water and cable TV were still a century away from reality, and not to read too much into it, but I let the loneliness and the frustration of being stuck fighting a war I never should have gotten myself into in the first fucking place get the best of me, and…

I was lonely. I was sad. All the good I'd done, evening things out in the universe catching bad guys and saving lives with the FBI, seemed to have been cancelled out by the blood I had on my hands barely halfway into my deployment. I was depressed about it, about all the killing I'd been involved with over there, and given the fact that I hadn't heard a peep from Bones in all that time, I was sure that she'd more or less forgotten about me and that, even though I'd been the one who told her that I needed to move on, it was her, in fact, who'd moved on. I got so sucked into my shitty little personal vortex of negativity that I basically forgot who I was dealing with, and like a selfish little bastard, just focused on how damn unhappy I was.

By the time Hannah came along, I was a wreck. I looked okay on the outside, I guess, keeping appearances up for the men who served with me and the brass above me in the Army food chain, but inside, I felt rotten—totally and completely worthless. Hannah was bright and bubbly, happy and sexy and fun, and being with her made me feel a lot less rotten on the inside. When I met her, I was lost, and I let myself get lost in her, because it was a hell of a lot better than letting things keep on the way they were, and feeling the way I'd been feeling. I used her. I hate to say it, but it's true. Hannah was a drug I used to ease the pain I was feeling, and the longer I used her company, her affection, to cover up the pain I was feeling, the more I forgot how I'd gotten myself there in the first place, and the more real what we had seemed to be.

But it wasn't. It wasn't real. It never was. I convinced myself that it was real, and when I started to have my doubts—when that little queasy feeling in my gut started to swirl around and make itself known—I shrugged it off and asked her to marry me. It was wrong. I was wrong. And the way I let her—us, really—go on like that for all those months, it was wrong. I hurt her. I hurt Bones. I hurt myself, I guess. I hurt everybody involved.

I can hear the wheels of a car—a taxi, maybe—crunching over the hard-packed snow on the street below my apartment window. I think about Bones climbing into that taxi earlier tonight, after we gorged ourselves on ballpark food (hot dogs for me, some kind of fake vegan hot dog thing for her, peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jacks) sitting in my new-to-me stadium seats from the Vet, and all I can think of is the look on her face when I told her I was angry.

"_I'm just, uhh, just angry," _I told her, leaning back in the chair as I crunched a peanut between my teeth. The smile on her face melted away and she looked at me with a nervous expression in her eyes as she waited for the other shoe to drop. _"Not at you," _I clarified, and I saw her let go of the breath she'd been holding.

"_Okay," _she sighed.

In that moment, in that single moment, seeing that tension and that relief, I saw how much I had hurt her already, and my chest tightened at the thought that I might be hurting her again.

I love her. I have loved her for a long, long time. I never stopped loving her, even when she told me she didn't have my kind of open heart, that she was a scientist and she couldn't change and implying, I guess, that she wouldn't be able to give me the kind of love that I wanted. Even then, even when I said I needed to move on, to find someone who would love me for thirty, forty or fifty years, I never stopped loving her. Even when I was with Hannah, I still loved her. And I love her tonight very bit as much as I did that night at the Hoover. Maybe even more, if such a thing is possible, after seeing how much she's grown and evolved as a woman and as a friend in the last year.

But I have to do this right. I can't rush it. As much as I want this—her—so damn bad, I gotta find a way to be patient so I can do it right this time. We've waited all this time, Bones and I, to get to the point where we can both be in the same place at the same time. I have to wait until the time is right. I fucked this up because I was impatient, because I didn't listen to my gut, because I didn't go with what I knew was true.

I remember when I got back from Iraq, back in 1991, I was a complete mess. I'd gotten captured during combat operations in Samawah and turned over to the Iraqi Republican Guard for interrogation because they knew I was a sniper—no major act of genius on their part, since I was carrying a sniper rifle when my spotter and I got ambushed. They'd assigned a pretty nasty senior officer to my case because they thought, as a sniper with an elite American unit, the 101st Airborne, I'd have a lot of intelligence value. But I proved to be a hard case, and I wouldn't tell 'em anything except name, rank and service number, no matter how many times he clobbered me with his fist or, after awhile, the nasty little leather blackjack he kept tucked in the back of his waistband.

My interrogator finally resorted to the next level, and knocked over the chair I was tied to so my feet struck straight up in the air. Then he took that blackjack of his and started wailing on the soles of my feet, over and over and over again. I bit the inside of my lip so hard it bled, but I didn't cry out, and I didn't tell them anything except name, rank and service number. They beat my feet until my soles cracked open and blood was dripping down my legs and running along the inside of my thighs. He must have hit my feet fifteen or twenty times each, again and again, until he exhausted himself with the effort. Then he had his goons right me up, untie me from my chair and drag me back down the hall—because I couldn't walk—and toss me back into my cell, where I stayed for four more days before I was rescued by a company from 1st Brigade of the First Armored Division (I remember their triangular red, blue and yellow shoulder patches with the little "1" at the top like it was yesterday).

The Iraqis had shattered my feet. I had multiple fractures in each foot—a couple of fractures in each foot called a "Lisfranc fracture" where the long bones in the middle of the foot break away from the shorter bones, plus a couple of broken toes in each foot—and I was first sent to Landstuhl, Germany, where they pinned and wired my feet back together, and then back to the U.S. I spent two months in a wheelchair with hard casts on each of my legs, and then after they took all the pins and wires out, I spent another two months in physical therapy, learning to walk and run again. Those were the longest four months of my life. I hated being in a wheelchair. I hated everything about it. I hated depending on other people. I hated not being able to do things for myself. I hated not being able to take a walk, or go for a run, or sit at a normal table in the chow hall, or take a shower like a normal person, or stand up and take a piss like a grown man. I wanted nothing more than to get back to my unit, to my buddies, and to get back to doing the job I'd signed up to do.

I hated being in a wheelchair. I fucking hated it. So when they finally took the casts off and I was allowed to start learning to walk again, I was ecstatic. I wanted so badly to walk again, and even though I was still supposed to use a walker—because after two months of not walking, my nerves and sense of balance was messed up—I didn't want to, and so what did I do, the stupid, cocky, impatient genius that I am? I rushed it. And I damn near tore a ligament in my knee in a fall trying to walk when I wasn't supposed to. I rushed it. I was impatient, and I rushed it. And I almost ruined everything by blowing out my knee when my feet and ankles didn't have the strength to support me.

I can't do that again.

I have to do this right. I have to get my fucking head screwed on straight, and make sure that I can be the man that Bones deserves, before I let this thing between us—because I know in my heart that we are fated to be together, the two of us—move forward. She deserves that. She deserves the best I have to give. And right now, just five weeks after I proposed to Hannah for all the wrong fucking reasons because I was too impatient or hurt—or whatever the fuck all my reasons were for not keeping my dick in my pants and waiting until me and Bones both got back to D.C. to see if we could make this work between us—I know my head's not at a level set quite yet. I have to work my way through all this.

I know what I want—to be with Bones, to love her and cherish her the way she deserves—but I know I'm still a little angry. I love her so much, and when we finally do come together, her and I, I want my heart to be pure, to be free from all the anger and frustration and hurt that's still knotted up inside of me after all that happened between us last year, and all of what happened with Hannah this year. I need to wash the poison out of me, to let go of all that anger. I want my heart to be free of all that, so when I give my heart to Bones, I can give her all of me.

I'm not quite there. I'm getting there, little by little, but I'm not quite there yet.

"_One step at a time," _the physical therapist at Walter Reed told me as I held the parallel bars and swung one battered-but-healed foot in front of the other in the therapy room. _"The ground beneath your feet will still be there, no matter how long it takes you to cross it. Just take it one step at a time." _

He was right.

Bones isn't going anywhere. She told me that tonight.

"_A time could come," _she said, _"when you aren't angry anymore and I'm strong enough to risk losing the last of my imperviousness. Maybe then we could try to be together."_

That time will come. And when that time comes, when I've got my head screwed on straight and managed to pluck free those little knots of anger that I've got tied up inside of me, then we'll be able to be together, the way I've always known we would be.

I know she's ready. When I proposed that we each write down on a piece of paper the time when she would give up the last of her imperviousness and I wouldn't be angry anymore so we could be together, I wasn't sure she would actually play along. She laughed at me when I suggested it, but then she went along. This time, for once I guess, I was the literal one, and I wrote down an actual date. I was thinking of it as a target date—the date by which I'm going to have all my shit together and will have let go of my anger. It figures, I guess, that, she wouldn't write down an actual date. I peeked when she was writing down her date—even though she told me not to look—and I saw her scribble _"now" _on her little scrap of paper. God, when I saw that, I felt my whole chest swell up with warmth. She's ready. She's ready now. I remember looking back at my own slip of paper after I saw what she'd written down, and trying to bite back a smile.

"_One year from today, we meet at the Reflecting Pool on the Mall."_

I folded my piece of paper in half and looked into the flame of the candle on the table in front of us. I could still feel it—that ache in my chest, the anger I felt for all the things I'd managed to fuck up in the last year—but I looked down at that little slip of paper and I swore, when May 20th, 2011 rolls around, I will be ready.

And so I looked up at Bones as we put our little pieces of paper in the candle flame and watched them burn.

I will be ready.

Because she is. She's ready to love me. I need to be ready to let her love me, and to love her back with a pure, light heart.

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**A/N: **_What did you think of what one?_

_Please let me know what you thought of that and take a minute to review. _

_Seriously, getting reviews means I know people are reading this stuff. And knowing that people are reading makes me want to write more of it. _

_So please, leave a review. Even a teeny tiny quick one would be hella awesome. *pleading Boothy puppy dog eyes*_


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